Don't allow dreams of youth to fade and die
http://www.timescolonist.com/life/allow+dreams+youth+fade/3710472/story.html
By Rosa Harris-Adler
October 22, 2010
Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
-- Herbert Henry Asquith, British prime minister (1852-1928)
--
It's a crime and a joy what children do to you. They sap you in your
prime. They demand that you give up the harebrained dream -- admit it
-- that you secretly harboured in your early-adult heart.
Surely, you remember the dream. You were going to drop everything and
move to New York. You were going to write a breakthrough book. You
were going to paint, or discover, or sing, or invent, or undermine
the system, or run for Parliament.
You were going to do all of the above, set the world on its ear and
make it beg for more.
Suddenly, there the children were, pink and squalling and cooing.
There were ear infections that kept you up all night. There was
homework that needed supervising. There was life insurance to buy,
pushing you onto the straight and narrow, chained to a job that paid
the freight.
You quickly discovered that you didn't discipline kids. Kids
disciplined you. All the unfocused energy that had gone into campus
politics and protests was now laser-beamed on the task of making life
secure for the little ones. Everyone but the most ambitious or driven
gave in to the sweet, messy inevitable, too tired and preoccupied to
contemplate the remarkably ordinary turn life had taken.
In the wake of diapers and day care, perhaps you abandoned the dream
without even noticing. Maybe it retreated to a corner of your
consciousness, surfacing from time to time like a starved phantom in
the middle of the night. Maybe it atrophied.
Well, take a good look around. The kids are launched. The day job is
winding down. And our huge, lumbering demographic -- those of us born
between 1945 and 1960 -- is wondering what to do next. And as we
wonder, the dream begins to gnaw at the rusting shackles of
responsibility that kept it down all those years.
We have an option here. We can put the dream out of its misery or we
can let it loose. We can take a long rest until the end of our days,
or we can act. We can bask in the bounty we've been graced with, or
we can do. We can dismiss as the callow misadventure of youth the
idealism that helped our American counterparts end a war in southeast
Asia, or we can own it.
Listen to Ron Kovic, the paralyzed Vietnam veteran who became and
remains a fist-shaking anti-war activist. His autobiography, Born on
the Fourth of July, was turned into a hit film.
"We have every reason to be proud," he said of the boomer cohort. "We
were brash and bold and beautiful."
He isn't disheartened by the way our passions were put on hold as we
went about keeping the wheels of society greased. In fact, he thinks
that we're on the verge of rediscovering our revolutionary fervour --
and that we'll give the term "the '60s" a whole new meaning.
"Often when people get older, they say to the younger generation,
'Well, it's your turn now,' " he said. "I feel very differently.
Rather than just passing the torch, and saying we did our best, this
generation -- which dreamed such big, impossible dreams -- refuses to
step aside. It sees itself as part of change that it still
passionately believes will occur."
Consider this, then, a call to arms. More appropriately, consider it
a call to the flowers that war protesters shoved down the barrels of
those arms, back in the day.
Most of us are fit and financially secure. We've got our wits and a
modicum of wisdom. We're weather-beaten, yes. But that means we're
seasoned, too. Heck, we're more than seasoned. We're marinated. And
the skills we've acquired with time are honed and at the ready.
The harebrained dream we harboured way back when is itching to be
free. It's weak and more than a little worn. But it's breathing. What
if it just needs some fresh air and sunshine and a healthy injection
of nutrients?
Just watch what can happen if we finally let it loose.
--
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